The financial news that actually matters
Nearly two years after hackers spent more than two weeks inside the systems of national insurance brokerage Alera Group, a $2 million settlement fund is open to people whose personal data was exposed. The deadline to file a claim is June 29, 2026, and anyone who received a settlement notice by mail is eligible to…
NOAA’s May 2026 hurricane outlook calls for 8 to 14 named storms, 3 to 6 hurricanes, and 1 to 3 major hurricanes of Category 3 or higher, with a 55 percent probability that the season will finish below the 30-year normal. El Niño conditions building in the tropical Pacific are expected to strengthen upper-level wind…
Picture a 75-year-old homeowner who has lived in the same house for decades, never borrowed a dime against a reverse mortgage, and owes nothing on the original loan balance. Now picture that homeowner receiving a foreclosure notice. Not because the bank called the loan due or the balance ballooned beyond the home’s value, but because…
A three-bedroom ranch in suburban Columbus, Ohio, listed at $375,000 in late April sat for nearly four weeks before its first serious showing. Two years earlier, a comparable house on the same street drew six offers in a weekend. That shift is not an anomaly. The median U.S. residential listing now takes 41 days to…
Atlantic hurricane season officially opens on June 1, 2026. For a coastal homeowner whose dwelling is insured at $400,000 with a 5% wind deductible, that date carries a specific price tag: $20,000 out of pocket before the insurance company writes a check. Not $500. Not $1,000. Twenty thousand dollars, due at the worst possible moment,…
Every month, millions of conventional mortgage borrowers send a payment that includes a line item they no longer owe. Private mortgage insurance, the surcharge lenders require when a buyer puts down less than 20%, can legally be canceled the moment a homeowner’s equity reaches 20% of the home’s original value. But the overwhelming majority of…
Every year, homeowners learn the hard way that their insurance doesn’t cover flooding. Not from hurricanes, not from tropical storms, not from the kind of heavy rain that turns a street into a river. Standard homeowners policies exclude flood damage entirely. Coverage requires a separate policy, and for most Americans, that means the National Flood…
When Hurricane Harvey stalled over Houston in 2017, the average flooded home without insurance faced more than $50,000 in unrecovered losses. Nine years later, the same 30-day gap that left those homeowners exposed is about to repeat. The National Flood Insurance Program imposes a 30-day waiting period on every new policy, and with hurricane season…
Somewhere north of 48 million American homeowners could walk into a bank tomorrow and borrow six figures against their house. On paper, the average mortgage holder now has roughly $213,000 in tappable equity, the portion a lender will actually extend credit against, according to ICE Mortgage Technology’s Mortgage Monitor reports from early 2026. That figure…
A homeowner who locked in a 2.9-percent mortgage in the spring of 2021 is not going to miss that payment if there is any way to avoid it. Lose the house, and the next loan comes at nearly 7 percent. That calculus, repeated across tens of millions of households, helps explain one of the most…